am a British West Indian, and eviscerated by being denied a PhD, and instead awarded an Mphil. This award is subsequent to sitting a Viva, and resubmitting in compliance with the corrections the examiners asked me to make. I cannot appeal this downgrade because it would be on the basis of challenging the examiners' academic judgment. This is outside the ambit of the awarding university's regulations.

I am not satisfied, in fact I am terribly unhappy, to be downgraded from a PhD to an MPhil. I have been racking my mind and seeking advice as to what can be done to secure an upgrade from an Mphil to a PhD. Having serendipitously stumbled across your website, I am hopeful that somebody might be able to help.

I will argue vigorously and rigourosly that I should have been awarded a PhD, seeing that I have done the corrections incumbent upon me, and even more significant - my thesis is the only doctoral thesis written on the Old Testament book of Obadiah. I did a search of the world's universities and none of the them registers any doctoral thesis on this book. This is a first for the world and the university that awarded me an MPhil.

Needless to say, it has been extremely difficult and upsetting to accept an Mphil. I would be most grateful for some sound advice on how I may upgrade. Can anyone help?

I'm not qualified to give you any real advice, but my opinion is that you should try any appeals processes that are open to you, and if that doesn't work, try and move on.

I suppose the first thing to note is that ALL PhD work is supposed to be breaking some kind of new ground. Granted, some will be more significantly new than others, but being the first to study something doesn't really make you any more qualified for a PhD as the point of a PhD anyway is to show that you can make a significant and original contribution to the scholarship.

If some kind of appeals process (if any are open to you - make sure you ask if there's any extra work or whatever that can be done to turn your MPhil into a PhD, like an extra year or two) doesn't work, then I doubt there's anything more you can do. Time spent fighting the decision is likely to just be time you could have spent moving on to a new job or a new PhD or something. It really does suck to work so hard on something and to not get what you hoped for, but sometimes it happens and you have to roll with it. An MPhil is nothing to sniff at, anyway.

Good luck.

Yes but there's also other things to consider, such as that sometimes incorrect decisions are made. There are people on here who have successfully challenged their PhD result and won - some of these went to court. Use the search bar at the top of the forum to try and find these topic threads.

There's also the fact that some international students have to pay back their funding if they don't get the PhD and this can be £150k or more.

So it's not as simple as an MPhil is still a good degree. It may be, but it wasn't the objective, so no one is going to be happy with it.

Note that the bit you quoted was after I'd talked about appeals processes and in the case that they don't work out...

Of course if he thinks he has a legitimate case he should challenge it - and I wish him the best of luck in that - but there's no guarantee it will work.